Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Five years ago today, John McCain crippled the Republican Party


Here's to you, quitters.

Thu Aug 29, 2013 at 11:46 AM PDT

Here's to you, quitters.Today is an important anniversary. No, it has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr., or with civil rights, or even the arduous physical labor of marching somewhere for some reason. Tsk—nothing that silly.

No, today is the five-year anniversary of John McCain introducing Alaska then-Gov. Sarah Palin to the nation as his serious, no-foolings vice presidential candidate [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/29palin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 ] , the person who would hold the nuclear football in the event that John McCain suddenly could not, the person chosen from among the entire Republican Party establishment as being the most capable person to help him run the country. Sarah Palin. That Sarah Palin.

Also, too, it was the moment when the national press had to decide whether to take the whole effort seriously or, you know, not. As it turns out this was not the conundrum it might have seemed, as we generally like to handicap our political races to make them at least a little bit exciting, and thus the bar for White House entry was lowered so low that even a dead salmon could swim over it, or something to that effect. We learned that Sarah Palin was an expert on Russian policy because she could see it. We learned that Sarah Palin reads all the newspapers. We learned that winking during a vice presidential debate is enough to send certain political fanboys squarely into the naughty-thoughts zone, and we learned that John McCain apparently had gone entirely daft. In what respect? In all the respects.

In hindsight, we should have been able to glean more from it than we did. The polishing up of Sarah Palin into something that could pass for an intellectual conservative voice was precursor to efforts to do the same with a whole host of difficult-to-polish "experts" over the next five years, a signal that soon we would be asked to take people like Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Rick Perry and Ted Cruz as Serious People as well. We should have learned from it exactly where the serious person line had been drawn, in those months before the tea party movement cemented their special brand of organized gullibility as the next big American thing. We should have realized that Sarah Palin was not going to be a nadir of the conservative movement, but the new upper bound. A bound where death panels was the serious argument, and let them die an applause line, and where you can prove your governmenting chops merely by quitting your governmenting job, rather than actually doing it. We really ought to have seen it all coming, but we just weren't cynical enough.

So here's to Sarah Palin, poster child of the modern conservative movement. The original tea partier, the original conspiracy theorist, the original dim bulb, the original quitter, the embodiment of the new conservative id, the splintered yardstick by which all more recent conservative intellectualism measures itself, the dead fish that wouldn't be caught dead swimming upstream, the Paul Revere of the conservative bus tour, and the original horseman of the Republican apocalypse. Here's to you, Sarah Palin. I have to think the Republican Party wouldn't be nearly what it is today if John McCain hadn't made that fateful call.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/29/1234810/-Five-years-ago-today-John-McCain-crippled-the-Republican-Party

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John McCain introducing Alaska then-Gov. Sarah Palin to the nation as his serious, no-foolings vice presidential candidate



Palin Quits as Alaska Governor